Sweden faces surge in bogus degrees

Bogus certificates and study credits purchased over the web are being used to secure jobs and university places in Sweden.

The number of university job applicants caught trying to pass off fake degrees as authentic has soared, with more than 30 cases detected in the past two years.

The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education fears that many more bogus degrees are going unnoticed in the private sector, as employers are not familiar with foreign qualifications.

The agency began cataloguing international degree-awarding institutions after it noticed a rise in requests from universities and higher education colleges to verify unknown foreign qualifications.

It found that the number of fake universities, operating largely via the web, had risen from 200 to 800 in the past four years. The agency estimates that the market in forged qualifications is worth £400 million a year.

Erik Johansson and Henrik Hansson, who conducted the study, found that the problem went beyond bogus foreign degrees: they discovered websites offering qualifications from prestigious Swedish universities. A bogus doctoral degree from Uppsala University costs about £200 from http:///fakedegrees.com .

The agency is advising universities and other degree-awarding institutions to make their documents harder to forge by introducing security measures.

"A degree certificate should be as counterfeit-proof as a passport, driving licence or money," Mr Johansson said. "Even lottery tickets are harder to fake than a degree certificate."

He is keen to see the introduction of a digital database that employers can access via a secure login to verify an applicant's qualifications.

"Australia is already looking into such a system."

In the short term, the agency recommends using more stringent checks to establish the authenticity of applicants' qualifications.

However, such a move could be compounded by the popularity of modular degrees in Sweden. Many Swedes take their degree after gaining study credits at different colleges and universities, including those abroad.